


Lula May Forever

by schweinsty



Category: Now You See Me (Movies)
Genre: Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Gen, Lula Needs a Hug, Mentioned Attempted Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8062966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweinsty/pseuds/schweinsty
Summary: The first time Lula learns a magic trick, she's four years old and scared.Or: How Lula learns magic, grows up, and joins a gang of international fugitives.





	

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT NOTE: This fic contains domestic violence and child abuse. It's not graphic, but it's present. Also, there's a mention of an attempted sexual assault of an underaged character, though it's also not graphic/explicit.

This is Lula May Peters, aged four and three quarters, sitting in the far left corner of her closet with the light turned on.

(Her mama heard her father coming home, and her mother said 'Lula, go play hide and seek' out of the corner of her mouth, wearily, like it takes effort to push the words out and breathe at the same time).

The light is on not because she is scared, but because the switch is too high for her to reach. She waits with her knees bent up against her chest and her hands wrapped around them, and it's not a huddle it's a fist-clenching lip-biting defiance of a wait.

When she is four and three quarters, she takes her stuffed rabbit, Beezers, with her when her mama tells her to go. When she is six, her favorite Barbie doll. When she is eight, her Uncle Mark who works on a fishing boat in Alaska and makes good money mails her a magic kit for her birthday, and her mama buys her a Barbie makeup kit.

“Lula,” her mama says, the next time, “Go to your room and stay there till I come get you, okay?”

Lula goes and stays and locks the door and learns how to make fake blood and hide a quarter in her sleeve.

 

The summer of 2002 when she is nine years old, Lula's reading about making fake flaps of skin and ignoring the heated argument outside her room when the noise crescendos into a clatter and suddenly stops.

For the first time ever, Lula doesn't wait for her mama to come get her; she unlocks the door and cracks it open.

“Put your shoes on,” her dad says when he sees her. “Your mama fell. We're taking her to the hospital.”

Ambulances, Lula knows, are expensive.

Mama's got a broken coccyx, which means she has to spend a couple weeks in bed and doesn't move around a lot for a couple months after that. It's the first long stretch of peace that Lula's ever known. Dad's feels guilty enough that he acts nice for three whole months, brings Mama flowers and buys Lula those shrink-wrapped five-packs of hardcover Nancy Drew mysteries they sell at Sam's for ten bucks a pop.

It also means, since Mama spends a good chunk of the day sleeping thanks to the pills she's taking, that Lula's got no one around to make her sit around the boring old house all day long.

It's the Nancy Drews that first put the idea into her mind. There are, like, fifty of them, ten or eleven packs with bright yellow covers that practically call out for her every time she sees them, and Lula knows it is her destiny to collect them all. Nancy's pretty cool, as a heroine; she always gets locked in closets instead of knocked unconscious like a proper detective does, but she's really smart and plucky and never takes no for an answer when she knows there's something going on.

It is, Lula decides, destiny that she should collect all the books.

Thing is, ten or eleven packs at ten dollars a pack is still way more money than even an apologetic dad is willing to shell out, and Mama's always said they're too poor for Lula to have an allowance. Lula realizes she needs a job, but she's too scrawny to walk dogs, no one wants to hire a girl to mow the lawn, and everyone says she's too young to babysit.

Maybe it is destiny.

The first time her mama takes a pill and falls asleep on the couch, Lula grabs her magic kit, puts on her top hat, and sneaks outside and down two blocks to the nearest park.

She bothers teenagers on dates and a babysitter with a toddler and finally hits pay dirt when she charms a two-year-old with a disappearing quarter and gets him to stop crying. His mama gives her three dollars and tells her she's a very resourceful little girl.

By the end of the week, she has five new mystery novels sitting on her dresser.

 

She's eleven when she gets her first party gig. Twelve when her dad breaks her arm and she still kicks the ass of everybody else at the talent show at school. Thirteen when she discovers skateboards and lipstick and the concept of capitalizing on niche audiences.

 

When she is fourteen, Uncle Mark, who probably feels guilty once in a while because it's kind of hard not to notice your brother's an abusive dickhead, and who sends occasional, unnecessarily extravagant gifts to make himself feel better, mails her a camcorder two weeks after Christmas. It is 2007, and YouTube is two years old. It takes her forty minutes to set up an account to her satisfaction. Her screen name is lulamay4ever because lulamayge is, unbelievably, already taken. She waits until she has the house to herself, films a short skit of her 'accidentally' chopping her thumb off (with extra blood gushing) and uploads it at the library. 

She links her email address 'For business inquiries' and has her first bar mitzvah set up six hours later. She orders a hundred business cards at the Staples near the school with Lula May, Geek Magician on them (because _Peters_ doesn't sound that snappy), takes half of them with her, and returns home empty-handed.

Two weeks later, she's studying the graffiti in the handicapped stall at the Barnes and Noble and sees, sandwiched between 'Team Rory' and 'PINEAPPLE', three words in teal sharpie: LULA MAY FOREVER.

This is her first brush with fame.

Lula finds she likes it.

After that, it's all just a matter of time and work. Time she has, and plenty of it, convincing her mom to let her switch to home-schooling so she can focus on the magic, and work she's never been afraid of (plus, magic is _fun_ ).

Seven months later, she spends her days filming skits and tricks for her web show, her evenings working on her podcast, and her weekends doing events. She's not rich yet, not even close, but she's making enough that she can squirrel some away every month, just in case, and leave her enough to live on for a month or two.

 

The year is 2008. Katy Perry's kissed a girl and seems to have enjoyed it quite a bit, Tony Stark's about to take his very first flight out of a cave in Afghanistan, and Lula May has an agent and a weekly 'Wacky Science' segment on the local news at noon.

Lula's painting up a set of fake fingers for next week's gag in her bedroom when her dad gets home at a quarter to six. There's a door slam, of course, which means he won't be in a good mood, and voices that start out low and tense and slowly gather intensity.

Usually, the storm would brew all evening and, if it broke, erupt an hour or two after supper.

Tonight, though, there's a scrape of chair legs against the floor, a quick outburst of swearing that cuts off suddenly, and a thump like a body falling.

When Lula comes out into the living room, her mama's calling 911 and her dad's lying on the floor clutching at the handle of the knife that's sticking out of his throat.

Lula's dad gets surgery and three weeks off from work. Lula's mom gets jailed overnight and released after her husband claims it was an accident. Lula gets emancipated and leaves and never looks back.

 

She lives with her agent for a while, until one night half a year later he decides she owes him something besides money for letting her crash.

Lula gives a heartfelt thanks, in her heart, to the boys she hung around with when she was fourteen who thought combat boots were really hot. She kicks her agent's face so hard she hears his nose crunch and leaves bloody boot treads leading out of his apartment when she runs.

She ends up in New York, eventually, and does shows on the street and in the park and at whatever club will take her.

 

When she is sixteen, she pulls a hat out of a rabbit. Two people vomit, one woman faints, and one of the audience members uploads a clip of it to youtube. The thumbnail's of her holding the rabbit in one hand and reaching into its mouth with the other, and the thing goes viral in a week.

Lula buys herself a camcorder and starts uploading videos again.

 

She makes a website with a _Donate_ button easily visible on every page and manages a comfortable-enough living that, if it's lonely and a little isolated, at least doesn't involve spiral fractures on her forearm or learning how to sleep on someone's couch with one eye open.

It's enough, for now.

 

Time flies by, and 'enough for now' starts to wear a little thin. She's kept up the videos and the website and is active on the four biggest magic forums online, but it all feels so inadequate. Her uncle emails, one time, tries to get in touch with her. She deletes it without opening it and spends the rest of the week telling herself it was the right thing to do, that he doesn't deserve anything else, because he knew—he _knew_ —and he never tried to help.

It bothers her, sometimes, that so many people are hurting like she was and there's nothing she can do to help them. Promises herself that no one's ever going to be able to think of her the way she thinks of her uncle.

She tapes her skits and posts online and does birthday parties and events at homes for seniors on a semi-regular basis and knows she's doing something that she loves and wonders if she'll ever do anything that matters.

 

And then a group of magicians rob a bank in Paris from a stage in Vegas.

 

The forums she's on light up even more than they do at Halloween, thread after thread on the Horseman and their show and how the hell they did it.

Lula maybe spends the week obsessing.

She's not the only one, though, so she doesn't feel bad about it, and she tells herself she'll do an episode about it for her channel and calls the hours she spends chatting about them research.

Jack Wilder, in particular, catches her eye; well, her eye at first, because dear God but he has amazing facial structure (and a body she would like to lick all over). Then the news shows do some research, and Jack catches a little bit of her heart as well, because what do you know but he had a shitty-ass childhood too. It feels like when she saw that five-pack of books, like that first time she hid in her closet and noticed her magic kit sitting on the shelf.

It feels like fate.

New Orleans only cements it. Here she is, wondering if she'll ever do anything with her life, and there the Horsemen are, giving cheated people back their money and using magic to do it.

And you can see, in the way they interact, how they touch and move and work onstage, all easy familiarity, that whoever the hell these people started out as, they ended up a family.

The night after New Orleans, she falls asleep with a number of large, unlikely, impossible plans floating in her head and wakes up still dreaming of them.

 

So it hits her harder than it otherwise might have when Jack dies.

Hell, she actually cries, and she didn't even know the guy.

The goals and dreams she's sketched out in a notebook get shelved for a week, until Lula gets frustrated at herself and yanks them back out.

She starts doing volunteer shows, donating proceeds to women's shelters and programs for disadvantaged kids. She helps her neighbor move out while her boyfriend's at work and gives the woman a cat she rescued forcefully from a mediocre magician who almost starved it to death.

 

Five months later, she's at a cafe asking a morgue attendant some questions about dead bodies for a gross-out episode she's writing for her channel. The subject of hemophilia comes up, because audiences _love_ blood, and the morgue attendant scrunches up her nose.

“Haven't had one of those in a while,” she says. “Funny thing, too.”

Lula, who's running on a serious sleep deficit from staying up all night editing, makes a vaguely encouraging noise.

“It's just, the last one I had,” the morgue attendant, Jackie, continues, making what Lula assumes is a blood-gushing motion with her hand. “He disappeared while I was on my lunch break.”

Lula chokes on her frappucino.

Disappearing bodies? She can so work that into the show.

“Young guy,” Jackie says. “Early twenties. Scrawny kid. Overdosed on sleeping pills. I prepped him for Dr. Vladimirsky's autopsy. I went on my lunch break, he went to the bathroom, and when he got back the body was gone. First weekend of March this year.”

The date rings something faint in Lula's memory, but she's focused enough on how she can work the story into her script that she doesn't put her finger on it until she asks how Jackie remembers the date so precisely.

“We got another body that afternoon,” Jackie says. “Pretty famous. That magician who robbed the French bank.”

And _Oh_ , thinks Lula.

 

She sets aside the script and episode and spends the rest of the week doing research and reconstructing it on paper. They'd have had to be precise, she realizes, down to a matter of seconds. It sounds almost impossible.

But 'almost' and 'entirely' are two very different things, and Lula logs onto one of her forums that weekend and posts a new thread.

'Ep idea: Jack Wilder Still Alive???'

She leaves the computer for maybe ten or fifteen minutes to nuke herself a burrito and check on the arm prosthetic she's got baking in the oven. When she comes back, the website's down.

She shuts it off when it doesn't come back in fifteen minutes and spends the evening binge-watching season seventeen of The Simpsons instead.

The forum does come back up the next morning, but two years' worth of data is gone and no one knows why. Lula doesn't repost her thread right away, not while all the fuss is going on about the site and all of that lost information, and that afternoon she gets an email from a company that does educational programming about doing a series of videos to tie in to their elementary-school science courses.

The episode about Jack gets put off indefinitely. Days turn into weeks turn into months. The videos for the learning company turn into a steady gig, as do the ones for a 'How To Learn Magic' website with beginner's courses, and Lula's so busy she doesn't get a chance to get back to her theory for ten months.

 

Then one day she walks back home from the bakery on the corner, half a doughnut in her mouth, and there's a tired-looking guy in a suit and tie sitting in her living room.

“Hope you don't mind, I let myself in,” he says when she stops short in the door.

He looks vaguely familiar.

“I'm Dylan Rhodes,” he says, “And I've got a job you might be interested in.”

 

She says yes, of course, and she never looks back.


End file.
